Photo gallery
Saltburn Pier, in colour.
Saltburn Pier Illuminations — a Victorian pier, restored in 500 individually addressable globes.
There are around fifty pleasure piers left on the British coastline. Saltburn-by-the-Sea has one of them. Built in 1869 and standing above the North Sea for over 150 years, Saltburn Pier is not infrastructure — it is memory.
In 2013, a tidal surge stripped the underside of the pier of its lighting entirely. For years after, the pier stood dark from below. Redcar and Cleveland Council determined that restoring that light was worth doing properly: not a like-for-like replacement, but a system capable of genuine performance across seasons, commemorations, and community events.
The MaxiLED Large Globe RGBW series — 48 VDC, data and power on a single two-core MaxiLINK cable, IP68 rated, individually addressable via DMX512 — answered every part of the brief. Five hundred luminaires. Two runs of 250 metres. One controllable system from pier entrance to sea horizon.
The installation runs in two parallel lines of 250 metres each, at half-metre intervals, suspended six metres beneath the pier deck. Five hundred individually addressable RGBW globes form a continuous ribbon of programmable light reflecting off the North Sea below.
MaxiLINK two-core cable carries both 48 VDC power and DMX data in a single run — no separate control cabling across 500 metres of coastal exposure. A Pharos Designer controller programs the full repertoire of seasonal performances: warm amber, poppy red, rose, slow breathing cycles at Christmas. Every colour controlled independently per globe, in real time.
Warm amber on an ordinary Tuesday. Poppy red from entrance to horizon on Remembrance Sunday. The pier was always a landmark; it is now also a medium — one that speaks in colour to a community that has watched it for generations. Completed to mark Saltburn Pier's 150th birthday year, the project has since become part of how the town marks its calendar.
What MaxiLED contributes here is range, not noise. The product is engineered to be individually addressable — and on Saltburn Pier it spends most of its life holding a single tone, a steady breathing line under the deck. When the programme calls for it, the entire 500-metre run shifts as one: full-spectrum colour, no banding, no drift across runs.
"The lighting installation needed to enhance the structure of the pier in a subtle and classic way, and the DMX RGBW globes were ideal to fulfil this. The MaxiLED system delivered the full flexibility the council needed across events and seasons — and the energy saving was substantial."